Christmas in the Field, part 2

Still no response on the turkey, and we are two days away. It really doesn't feel like Christmas, since we are ramping up our closing activities. Tents will start coming down, the stock will be emptied out, and donations will be made.

We get the cargo list today for the plane that arrives tomorrow. We should be receiving our Christmas good order, that included chocolate, butter, wine, carrots, potatoes, lemons, cheese. The luxury items we can't find here.

There is a sheep screaming every minute or so outside of our compound, tied on a tether and awaiting Christmas. I guess lamb is plan B if the turkeys don't come through. The sheep is very unhappy with the idea, and lets us know, all day long. He's got grass and water, but he seems to want friends. Demanding sucker, he is. We'll eat him soon.

I'm off to give the plane briefing to the four people flying home to Lubumbashi tomorrow. Our team is slowly reducing from 30, until in a week and a half we will be 0.

Merry Christmas, Kapanga.

Christmas in the Field, Part 1

I'm searching for a turkey. Two, to be exact.

I've gone the 8km into the administrative center of the district, because, believe it or not, I've seen two turkeys there. I guide the driver with vague hand gestures. Were they there, or down by the river... The need to scrape my memory disolves as two huge turkeys appear in the road in front of us.

Found em.

Gla gla la la la!

They call a greeting as we show up, searching for their owners. We ask a few policemen who are lounging around. Can we buy these turkeys?

I explain that in the culter where I come from, we eat turkeys for special occasions. Christmas is coming! We want a turkey dinner!

The owner is apparently the district administrator, and he has returned to Lubumbashi for the holidays. We cannot buy these turkeys. We ask if they know of any other turkeys in the area. They point us to the Sisters at Ntita.

Off we go.

5 kilometers later, we pull up to a sprawling campus with huge brick buildings soaring over graceful arcades. The gate us opened by enthusiastic children as we approach, and we walk into a quiet, clean courtyard with the sounds of a student choir echoing out of a nearby building. We walk into the nearest occupied room and state our mission. They point us to the headmistress's office.

We shuffle in, not wanting to interrupt, but everything stops when I enter. Oops. Chairs are brought and we ask after turkeys. She laughs and wracks her memory. No turkeys here, and there haven't been any for a long time. Are there any turkeys for sale in the area? She thinks and calls to her colleagues. We are encouraged to buy a cow instead, but after insisting in turkeys, they recommend a place in town.

5 more kilometers later, just a few hundred meters from our front door, we ask the trucking agent for turkeys. He knows two people with turkeys, and he'll get in contact with them today. We can come back in the evening and check if they are willing to sell.

A lukewarm lead, but better than nothing.

We head to the market and ask if anyone has heard of turkeys for sale. We get pointed to a place around the corner and ask there. Dead end. We head back via a restaurant with a very nice owner and ask her. No luck either.

Content that we have gotten the word out sufficiently, its time to wait.

Our wild turkey chase has turned up nothing so far, but we shall see what Monday brings.

Heart of Darkness

I'm in Kapanga, which is a zone in the Democratic Republic of Congo's southern Katanga region. It's my first time in Congo, and it's living up to the stories. I've heard it is beautiful with friendly, proud people. I'm not in the deep jungle, but it is hillier and greener than anywhere else I've been in Africa.

We are closing our project after investigating the epidemic status of the measles outbreak.  We opened here in early November, with the intention of closing on December 31st.  With a few weeks to go, we will meet this goal.  These last few weeks are filled with meetings, finalizing plannings and schedules, back-and-forth emails with the coordination team, and lots of questioning why we are leaving.

It feels bad to be closing our doors on a pediatric unit that is just starting to become flooded with patients, but it is the end of our mission, the measles epidemic is over, and our long-foreseen depart is almost upon us.  That doesn't make us feel much better as we brief the teams and prepare the final trainings for a handover with the Ministry of Health.

I'm making up the packing list of unused materials that we will start to send back on the plane next week, to start the 3-week long closing process.  Staff will start leaving on Monday, first in a trickle, then in a flood.  There are many things to do, logistically.  But there is still time to enjoy the scenery.

Here vs There

It's been another trip back, another time warp and culture shock.  I left the field on Thursday, September 10th, then stopped in Juba, Paris, and New York before returning to San Francisco.  I had a full weekend in Paris, taking my first hot shower and walking alone.  I re-learned how to cross streets, enjoyed the convenience of supermarkets and reveled in the abundance of the farmer's market.  Then it was on to New York, with a one-week pause to see family and friends.  I ended up sleeping in a different place every night for 8 nights running, which was a bit of an adventure.  Then it was back to the West Coast, adding another few hours onto the jetlag, and increasing my already-six-month-long sleep debt.  Time for some relaxation.

Every time I return, I'm struck by certain differences.  Last time, the technological gap seemed to me like time travel.  This time, I'm really noticing the fashion and beauty standards of the two very disparate places that I live.  Coming back, I feel that everyone here tries to be the same.  As I take the bus in San Francisco, up into the Marina District, the stereotypical Marina Girl populates the bus.  They have tight black yoga pants, a slouchy I-don't-care shirt, long gorgeous brown hair that costs a lot of money, a trendy phone in a cute case, ear phones, and makeup.  I see them in a row, and I wonder what the story of each of their lives is like.  I cannot fathom that they are each individuals.  It's shocking to see this drive to homogeneity, in a society teaching every millennial "you're special," "you're unique," "you're a pretty snowflake."  And many millennials strive toward the current flavor of beauty or perfection, turning themselves into indistinguishable dolls.

Coming back from Aweil, South Sudan, this is shocking to me.  In Aweil, many people have never seen themselves.  Open water is too muddy to provide a clear reflection.  There aren't too many mirrors.  Our security rules prohibited the taking of photos, but for my work, I needed to take pictures of construction works.  I would try to avoid taking pictures of any person, since getting their permission is time-consuming.  I'm just trying to take a picture of that latrine pit, excuse me.  Sometimes, though, children would see us taking pictures of construction works, and clamor for a picture.  They would grab the phone and turn it around and stare at it.  When I took a picture of the progress of a pit being dug, the workers asked me to print out the picture.  I brought it the next day and gave it to them.  Eight grown men stopped work and clustered around.  They stared at themselves.

People live a difficult life, and it is apparent in their appearance.  Aside from being gaunt, they are scarred (many ritually, with tribal identification scarification) and sometimes disfigured.  Missing eyes or limbs are not extraordinarily uncommon.  People are stamped with the journey of their life.  They are individuals, and show on their faces the times they have been through.  They are self-conscious to different beauty standards.  Much stake is given to someone's appearance and clothes. Shoe-shine boys wander the streets, making their living in polishing the population's shoes.  Everyone has their shoes shined.  Men wear button-down shirts, neatly pressed and laundered.  Perhaps they are threadbare and torn at the seam, but they are clean and neat.  Women wear clothes with a vibrant and colorful fabric wrap tied around their shoulders, adding splashes of color to the market.  They do their hair and style it, or wear wigs and keep their head shaved for convenience.  But no one is fixing their face.  No one is changing their appearance to look more like a beauty standard of the country.  There is no body sculpting, no plastic surgery, no make up.  No journey towards a perfect beauty standard to make everyone homogeneous.

But maybe that's because they don't yet have the resources for it?

I'd say to show your scars, be yourself.  You're beautiful the way you are.

This Week Requires Documentation

Many of my posts are day-in-the-life posts, which I write after a particularly crazy stretch of activity.  Sometimes I'm struck with the thought, "This is too crazy; I have to tell someone."  Sometimes those days are memorable, like when key personnel were on vacation, a team got stuck on the other side of the river as the ferry broke down, and a cholera outbreak was just announced in the western part of the country; or when riding along on a vaccination campaign.  Sometimes, they're not particularly memorable but distill the amount of activity of a project into one encapsulated story.

This week was an example of ludicrously high levels of activity, where I kept asking, "Is this a joke?  Candid camera? The Truman Show?  It's a test.  It's gotta be a test."

Some background: I'm the logistics referent at a project in South Sudan for MSF.  I coordinate the logistic activities (operations, maintenance, infrastructure, engineering, supply, this sort of thing) for a 200-bed hospital, including warehouse/pharmacy complex, office, and housing for 25 expats.  My team is divided into 3 branches (base, hospital, and supply).  We're 100 logistic staff, all together.  We have been short one manager for the past 5 months.  Sometimes that's a base manager, sometimes it's a hospital manager, sometimes it's a supply manager.  The team here has had to fill gaps for a long time, and since supervisors are responsible for keeping the day-to-day activities running, it falls to me to replace the managers.  After all, I'm here in pure support.  I do quality control, training, and coordination, but no actual management or tasks.  In my job as log ref, I don't actually do work, I like to say.

This week was the perfect storm of ridiculousness.  Last week was the visit of the Logistics Coordinator from the capital, and the Logistics Supervisor from headquarters.  It's a big visit, so I was preoccupied with them.  There is no hospital log at the moment, so I was covering that position, plus doing my job, plus hosting those two.  Needless to say, this took a lot of energy, and the team was tired from a big visit, plus pulling more weight than usual.  We also had my going-away party on Saturday, since I'm leaving (inchallah) in another couple of weeks, which was another load on our department.

Monday starts with dismantling tents and recovering from the party, but quickly escalates.  The AC technician flying in from Juba, for his quarterly maintenance of the project's air conditioners.  Also, a flying radio technician arrives from Paris, to do inventory and evaluation of the project.  He doesn't speak any English, and I don't know what his objectives are.  I learned about him from the movement plan, rather than getting briefed on why he's coming.  I don't know what to do with him, and only the Supply Log and I can speak French in the whole department.

Tuesday ups the ante, because the Supply Log leaves for vacation.  Vacation was planned a long time ago, and he is dragged kicking and screaming (metaphorically) onto the plane.  He knows it's a ridiculous week, and he doesn't want to leave us alone.  He has to go anyway.

Also leaving on Tuesday is the biomedical/electrical technician, to make his quarterly visit to a sister project.  He was taking care of the AC technician, so in absence of the biomed electrician, and the hospital log, I'm the one to follow the AC technician.

So we're left with only one French speaker (me), minus a biomed focal point, with a couple of technicians running around, poking into corners.  Then two more visitors arrive.  The country mechanic, from the sister project, arrives to install the gear box on the vehicle that's out of commission.  We had received the gear box from the capital the week before, and have been renting a car to cover for the out-of-commission vehicle.  Also arriving with the country mechanic is the generator technician, from the company supplying our generators.

I forgot to mention that one of the hospital's generators stopped producing electricity a week ago, so we've been running without backup for a week.  We did a marathon wiring session on Friday afternoon, involving 4 electricians working side-by-side for an hour, to get the old MoH generator hooked up as a temporary backup.  Monday, the only working generator ran out of fuel (because I didn't keep track of the fuel consumption and forgot to check that morning; did I mention I'm a bit overloaded?), so we fired up the MoH generator, only to find that phase 3 doesn't output any power.  Also, it keeps tripping its breaker because it's too small to support the whole hospital.

So at least the technician is here to look into that, but since the biomed/electrician has just left, again it falls to me to follow the repairs.  Maybe the country mechanic can help a bit too.

There are no flights on Wednesday, so I can't lose any more people, or gain any more repairmen who need to be followed.  But instead fuel arrives, and they get impounded in customs, with the government trying to extort money.  I'm in the middle of negotiations to sell an unused generator, so the project coordinator takes over and talks with customs.  A full morning of negotiations later, the fuel is released.  It takes me an hour to get the counters calibrated and fueling started, then I recruit the first person I see (a medical consultant here for a week to help with data collection and analysis) to supervise the end of the pumping.  After a rapid induction into the order of Log, I leave her to supervise.  I hurry to the hospital with the other tanker, to unload the fuel there.  I explain the amounts of fuel to go in which 3 tanks, writing the numbers in the dust on the tanks.  I'm glad I learned arabic numerals.  I call a watchman to supervise the fueling, since I have to go to a monthly meeting of all sanitation officers, since I'm the acting Log Hospital.

Thursday was the most ridiculous day of them all, with the famed arrival of the cargo plane.  In the morning, the AC technician did a whirlwind tour just before leaving to the airport, where I typed his report for him in a last-minute blitz of documentation.  Due to a miscommunication, he didn't know he was supposed to remount a compressor, but the compressor mount we had installed was in the wrong place.  We frantically searched for a welder, but had to stop the work just as the welder got started, in order for the technician to catch the plane.  The near miss was very disheartening, since the work was completed 30 minutes after his departure, and we could have had it all sorted if there was someone here following the technician.

We had been discussing for weeks the arrival of a huge shipment of medical material.  We had been tracking it from its arrival in Nairobi to its sporadic journey by refrigerated truck overland to Juba, through customs and checkpoints, to arrive at Juba airport.  The orginal plan was for it to arrive on the 21st.  Then it was pushed to the 24th.  Then we heard on the 24th that it was coming on Thursday.  With the signing of the peace agreement in Juba on Wednesday, we almost cancelled the whole thing, since the airport was closed and we couldn't get our trucks in.  We finally got word on Wednesday night that we were on for Thursday afternoon.  This meant that our offload time collapsed from 5 hours to less than 2 hours.

The Log Supply was devastated that he was going to miss the plane.  So was I.  Without him, it fell to me to organize the offloading and transporting of 13 tonnes of medical cargo.  He had already done all of the preparation, of clearing the space in the warehouse to temporarily store the drugs, of finding and negotiating with the truck drivers, of estimating daily worker needs, of planning the work flow.  I just had to step in and execute, and the logistics team here surged into the gap.  We had trucks, we had workers, we had pallets, we had water, and luckily, we had good weather.

The plane landed at 2:14pm.  When the engine stopped and the doors opened, the captain asked me if he could take off at 4pm.  We did the math and determined 4:30pm was the drop-dead maximum needed to leave Aweil.  We agreed we'd try to have them gone at 4pm.  A mere hour and a half after the first truck will pull up to the cargo door.

What followed was a gleeful execution of a large-scale logistical plan, reminding me why I do my job, why I love it, and how much fun it can be.  It was exhausting, but invigorating.  Twenty loaders formed constantly fluctuating lines to various vehicles, stacking boxes, throwing medications, and calling to each other with observations and jokes.  With two trucks having to come back after they unloaded at the pharmacy, we stripped the Antonov-12 of 13 tonnes of medical cargo in 90 minutes.  A stressful last-minute explanation of MSF policy led to 100 disappointed people who wanted to hitch a ride on the plane back to Juba, but we got the Antonov airborne at 4:08pm.

That was only half the story, with landing fee negotiations followed by a fierce rainstorm, followed by the final unloading of the backlogged trucks at the warehouse.  We had over 30 loaders at that point, but it still took longer to unload than load, since we had to stack boxes in piles that at least made a cursory nod to safety.  With the warehouse reorganized, cleaned, stacked, and stuffed, we finished just shy of 7pm.  We'll pay tomorrow.

Friday ended a week with a gearbox not repaired, a generator disassembled and waiting on a part from Juba, a car rental extended, several contracts for final rehabilitation at the hospital signed, materials lacking for the two new sleeping huts we are building in the compound, and a running hospital.  The radio referent left, with much kerfuffle of not having his ticket and not speaking English.  The generator technician promised to come back in a week or two to fix the generator, but he helped to repair the current backup.  At the end of the day, I did a final walkthrough with the electrician on contract for some small repairs, since no one else was available to follow him.  I frantically got the signed release of payment in to the administration just at the 5pm deadline.  Success!

The week had ended, and we had cleaned all compounds, completed supply and purchasing, and kept the hospital (mostly) running.  There were countless small HR questions, meetings, negotiations, emails, and little crises that were solved or smoothed over in the course of a normal working day.  We had 4 visiting technicians running around, tracked by a 5-person team covering 8 positions.  It was the craziest confluence of events leading up to the most desperately busy week of normal operation I have heard of.  There was no emergency, no crisis, but everything seemed to happen this week.  Everything that needed to happen over the course of a month, or even a quarter, seemed to be distilled into one quintessential MSF week.

Now my replacement arrives on Monday, and I can start the handover process.  Inchallah.

Talking Politics

I have a staff meeting with all the managers and supervisors on my team every Friday.  We talk about everyone's activities, the project's activities, and strategize about upcoming events or issues.  Sometimes, we get off topic, either before the meeting as we're waiting for everyone to arrive, or during.

We have talked about cows, and the Dinka tradition of dowries for wives, traditionally paid in cows to the father of the bride.  We talked about the legal minimum of cows, about what happens if someone cannot pay, about eloping, and about women 'buying' men instead of the other way around.  It was a general conversation filled with laughter and cultural sharing.  They found our questions just as ridiculous as our answers, and we all had a good time learning from each other.

This past week, a discussion of opening the new malnutrition ward prompted a discussion of market state, after the economy collapsed in April of this year.  My staff asked me why the US dollar was so strong, and why prices were rising so much.  I'm just a logistician for a humanitarian aid organization, but all of a sudden, I was an ambassador from the developed world, asked to explain the current global financial state to my team.

Umm, you ask a very good question.  It's a long answer.

I explained that South Sudan is a rich nation.  It has oil, which is a very hot commodity.  But they cannot get their oil to the market, since the existing pipeline dates from a unified Sudan, taking the oil from the south of the old nation through to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea.  Now these days, the pipeline is through an aggressive neighboring country, who is sort-of-kind-of at war with South Sudan.  The only way to get South Sudan's abundant oil to the market is to send it through Sudan's expensive-to-use pipeline.  This is because Sudan is now a poor nation, with most of its oil reserves stripped away when South Sudan became independent.  They're terrified of losing all of their income, so they jack up the prices on the use of the pipeline, since they've cornered the market as the only way to get oil out of the country.  South Sudan doesn't even have a refinery in the country.

I draw a comparison.  I tell my staff, you have so much sorghum in Aweil.  You want to get your sorghum to Juba or to Kampala, and you take the Wau road.  But Wau becomes a different country, and they're not friendly.  All of a sudden, the road through Wau is very expensive.  How do you get your sorghum (of which you have plenty but you cannot grind it so you can't eat it) to the markets in Juba and Kampala?

They say to take another road, so we discuss the Pipeline proposed through Kenya, to be built in 2016.  The project was cancelled soon after it was announced.

I explain to them Bashir's position, the leader in Sudan.  If I were him, I would be terrified of losing money, because then he doesn't have an army, then he doesn't have a presidency, and he's facing charges of war crimes from the international criminal court, so he doesn't want to be ousted or exiled.  But he's just seen his whole country's oil revenue disappear in the last 4 years.  Thank goodness he has that pipeline, but then all of a sudden Kenya will collaborate and build a pipeline from their side.  This is not good.

So Bashir will do everything he can to prolong a destabilizing civil war in South Sudan, so no one can think about negotiating for a pipeline, even if it means significantly reducing both country's incomes as the oil production drops (oil fields are being fought over by both sides, which makes oil production hard; apparently workers don't like to extract oil while in the middle of a battlefield).

Everyone is nodding around the circle, and I ask them, because I honestly have no idea, what to do about the situation.  What can they do, as intelligent and capable citizens of South Sudan.

They start telling me of how you can be arrested if you speak out against the government.  How the press is not free.  How you cannot enter into government unless appointed.  I jot down quick sound bites.  "You cannot go to the media.  You will be arrested, and sometimes you will just die."  The frankness of their discussion is unnerving.

"If you see a dog and they [the government] say cat, say 'OK, cat' and go on your way.  Just go, or else they can arrest you."

"Let every family find a small place like that one and work hard and put some food inside.  Then whatever happens, let it come.  You will have your food and you will save your family.  You cannot sleep.  You must work and put something away."

I ask if one of them might not be able to change anything.  What's the future?  They say it's families.  The children of those in charge will be in charge.  There's nothing for them.  I ask them, do they talk with the children of the leaders, so that when they are in charge things will change?  This seems like the best option, but they explain to me that the children are being educated in other countries.  In Nairobi or Kampala.  The one benefit to the economic crisis, they tell me, is that the ministers cannot afford to keep their children in school in these other countries, so all the children are coming back to be educated in South Sudanese schools.  My team explains that maybe the quality of the schooling will increase when the leaders' own children will rely on it.

The conversation turns to the intellectual class, and my team urges me to change my nationality.  They say I could be in parliament here.  They say, "Let you come to be in South Sudan.  There are many women in government.  The governor here before was a woman.  There are 4 sitting heads of state in Africa who are women.  You would get many cows."  As dowry, since talk of a woman always seems to go back to her price.  Another team member offers "You would get 100 cows maybe."  This is outrageously high in Dinka culture.  Someone else chimes in "200, even."  Now I know they're joking, and we turn back to other things.

We continue the meeting talking about the details of the malnutrition ward we will open on Monday, and the possibility of another malaria ward to open soon.

Recruitment

I'm sorting through around 60 applications for two positions.  They're all manila envelopes with hand-written notebook pages of cover letters, followed by photocopies of certificates, and usually a computer-printed CV.  Occassionally a CV is hand-written, or an application comes without an envelope.  But they all are surprisingly similar.  Even the handwriting is largely the same, since it's clear that they paid someone to write their cover letter for them.  The candidate may come later for an interview and not even speak English, let alone write in beautifully precise paragraphs.

The cover letters blur together, all detailing people's ages, religions, numbers of children, and all sort of other discriminatory data that I'm supposed to not pay any attention to, at least in the culture where I grew up.  Phrases such as "God bless you most" and "I will be the best candidate" and "God willing, you will give me this position because I need a job" all appear, sometimes multiple times in the same letter, as I sort through.

We usually tackle the triage of the applications as a team.  Last month, we sorted over 200 applications for the 2 positions of watchman available.  We narrowed it down to 30 candidates to interview, with 10 applications kept as backup in case we couldn't get through to an applicant.  Everyone wants to work for us, while the CVs show the effects of South Sudan's ranking as the least literate country in the world (at least according to wikipedia).  There are so few jobs in the country, due to instability and underdevelopment, that people's CVs read as a list of NGOs.  Reason for leaving job: closure of project (lack of funds).  Also popular are government jobs: survey taker, census officer, election ballot watcher, town crier.  These last for a matter of days.  Fewer still are the teachers, or clergy.

Many have never had a job that they can put on the CV.  Their CV is fleshed out with education details, and courses attended.  "Fire extinguisher training" is next to "two day workshop for volunteers on volunteers document" (I don't know what that means), after "Certificate of appreciation for South Sudan Referendum."  CVs include hobbies, as people uphold the standard format of CVs as taught by experience, internet courses, and common knowledge.  Hobbies listed include reading newspapers, swimming, listening to the radio, sleeping.

The cover letters finish:
"I shall be greatful if you recruit me to be a member of your staffs."
"My hope be with you forever if you are accept this my application to employ me under your controll"
"May God bless you if you put my application on consideration with much appreciation from your desk."

They talk about being jobless, they talk about feeding their families, they talk about working hard.  And dozens after dozens are put in the reject pile because I cannot take them all.  I must decide who can do a physical job based on these precious scraps of paper they have given to us, for us to sort and discard as they all become anonymous.

I feel like "The Man," and I hate it.  And I start to understand the other side of the coin, the big corporations, and I hate that I can comiserate.  What a weird position I have found myself in, at the end of the earth, as a humanitarian.  I guess I'm not working for the Man, I'm just becoming him.

Digging Ditches

I came home today covered in mud spatters, with sunglasses, face, hair and clothes crusted with dried mud splashes.

The Supply Log and I were making a tour of the warehouse, and we walked past a large puddle of water.  Stagnant water is a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and in a country with one of the highest incidences of malaria, that is a bad thing.  We ask the watchman to channel out the water, to try to drain the big puddle so it dries faster.  We continue our tour, checking the lights, doors, etc.

By the time we're done, the watchman hasn't gotten so far, so we jump in to help.  He's gotten far enough that you can see his progress, so the puddle is tantalizingly close to draining.  We jump in with shovels and hoes too.

Ten mintues later, we let go of all appearances of just "waiting for the car" and bust out the picks and heavy digging tools.  The supply log strips off his shirt, and we really get going.

An hour later, the puddle is almost completely drained, and the ditches zigs and zags along 50 feet of slope.  The supply log, who was smart and conscientious about getting mud all over himself, wipes down, dons his shirt, and is ready to go.  Me, not being able to take off my shirt in public, and having chosen to wear a white shirt today, I am a mud monster.

But at least the puddle is dry.  Sometimes, it's so great to point to something and say, "I did that,"  And not in a procedural-approval-funding sort of way.  A physical sweat-it-out sort of way.

Random Looks

I keep my phone in my pocket at all times, next to a copy of my passport and a country-wide contact list.  I use it as a calculator and camera, rather than a link to the outside world.  It's a good notepad.

Despite our no-photos policy for the country, I need to take pictures for documentation and communication with coordination.  We have several construction projects going on right now, and there's always the requisite broken part that needs replacement.  Combined with the policy to not take pictures of environments, people, or property, this leads to some pretty odd photo collections on my phone.  Showing my photos from a mission to friends back home is pretty anti-climactic.  "This is the latrine.  This is the other side of the latrine.  This is the roof of the latrine.  This is the little hole in the corner of the roof of the latrine..."

They don't come close to answering the question of what is it like, but it's interesting to stop and explain some photos from a normal week in my life on mission.

It was a busy day in the office, and when the printer made its way in to be tested, that was threshold of ridiculous amounts of stuff in my office.  Hence, picture.

We had a huge thunder storm on Friday, and during the storm, apparently, the ceiling fan wobbled enough to embed a blade in the ceiling.  Oops.

A sunset over our compound

The major construction site, with 6 projects to be completed this year.

 

 

Drainage channel construction in the courtyard of the hospital.  Look at the channel.  I mean, really look.  This is why my slide shows stink.

Mmmmm, grease.  Cleaning out the grease trap, which was so disgusting I had to take a picture of it.  They're not usually this bad.

I needed to show the size of our gravel.

See where our percolation test hole is?  A picture is worth a thousand words.

We need this part for a land cruiser.

Our phase balancing for our warehouse generator.  I'm more worried about the low voltage output on phase 1.

Blood Bank

"Log Ref, Log Ref for Blood Bank."

"Go ahead for Log Ref."

"The log tag is alarming, over."

"Can you send it with a driver? Over."

"Can you come to see? Over."

"Yes, but later.  I'll be there a bit later.  Over."

"Affirmative.  Thank you, out."

This is not the conversation that I want to be having at 7:45am on Sunday, but with the pharmacist on his one-week R&R leave, I guess I'm the de-facto cold chain monitor-er.  We don't want to lose any blood units, and we've already had several cold chain breaks that threatened our blood stock.  We've changed out the fridge, so I'm confident that the fridge is OK.  I don't know what all the alarms are about, but I'll check anyway.

Weekend

This weekend is exceptional only in that Saturday is SPLA day--a national holiday to celebrate the founding of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army.  We're woken at 6:30am to the sound of small arms fire rippling through the town.  We all stare blearily at each other as we stumble out of our tukuls in the pre-dawn light.  We knew celebrations would happen, and we knew celebrations involve firing into the air.  We have been warned to stay inside and not move by foot on Saturday.  Bullets raining out of the sky is not an appealing weather forecast, and it has become all the more real at sunrise today.  I watch the sky as I head to the latrine, even though I know it's silly.  Still, I don't see any bullets.

The rest of Saturday passes in a normal whirlwind of slowly getting my list done while other problems emerge.  It feels like swimming upstream.  I have a meeting about patient flow in the ICU, but then get sucked into a supply discussion about expat food, which we truck in from the capital.  How will the rainy season effect our consumption of Pringles?  I wrangle all of my supply questions onto a paper, quickly cross a few small, pressing tasks off the list, then head to the hospital to urgently plug in the fridges that I moved yesterday.  They need time to settle after they're relocated, and we want to monitor their performance all day before moving the products into them.  I visit a few construction sites while I'm there, then call the Logistics Coordinator in Juba to ask all the supply questions.  After, I head to the warehouse for a weekly walk-through of the pharmacy and warehouse to see the premises and ask any relevant questions.  Halfway through, we find a huge shelving unit, newly built.  The log in charge of the warehouse and I exchange looks.  "Did you do that?" "No, did you?" "No."  Silence.

After a quick debrief about cold chain, a couple more tasks, and a recruitment preparation, I grab a 20-minute lunch of salad (hard boiled eggs chopped with cucumbers, tomatoes, and some sort of local parsley) and bread, then sit for a clarification meeting on the questions we will ask during this afternoon's interviews for a top-level logistics manager.  We have half an hour to get our act straightened out, and we cram in the final edits and hit print as the first candidate walks in the door.

Four hours later, we're done with interviews, and I haven't checked in with my team at all.  I try to find them to ask about disciplinary procedures, electrical installations, and supply status, but I can only get a quick update on a disciplinary procedure about a driver who threatened a colleague.  Sigh.  I'm off to the hospital to check cold chain to see if we can switch blood (which is very sensitive to temperature change) to the newly-functional fridge we just installed.  The shift changes at 7pm, but it's 6:45pm.  The only driver happens to be in the above-mentioned disciplinary interview, so instead I call references on the candidates we just interviewed.  I won't make the shift change, so we agree to move blood tomorrow, afer confirming that the roster has the personnel capable of switching blood actually scheduled to work tomorrow.

At the hospital, as dusk falls, I slip into the OT, change into gown and slippers, and trudge into the recovery room.  I run my tests, check the temperature, and move the drugs into the fridge.  The cooler where they spent the day can stay until Monday.  We'll haul it away during working hours.  Off to the blood bank, to check the temperature just in case, since the pharmacist is on leave, even though we will be moving the blood tomorrow rather than today.  Just as I finish, my technical referent calls me from Juba to check on several points.  Construction, cold chain, radio, supply, we go over several areas as I head back to the base.  After the call is lost due to bad network, or low battery, or something, I head into the recruitment debriefing meeting where the admin team, the project coordinator, and I all decide the results of the interview.  It's inconclusive, and we agree on a course of action.

As the meeting breaks up, I sneak into my office to close out the day, and wrap my head around the list of things I was supposed to do today, sitting on my desk forgotten for 12 long hours.  I settle my thoughts and organize myself for Monday, even though I'll probably manage a couple of hours on Sunday just to keep things rolling.

At 10pm, I clock out and go grab a beer at our dining/hangout tukul in the living compound.  Time for dinner, it's Saturday night.

We all sit around talking and hanging out, much preferable to a night club, bar, or other typical nightlife scene, for me.  People trickle in and out, and we break out the rum.  Captain Morgan is imported from somewhere, and we briefly muse over how far it as come.  Around 1am I turn in, leaving the last few people debating the pending economic collapse of South Sudan.  Or maybe they had moved on to favorite ice cream flavors, or fart jokes.  It's all on the table at this point.

Sunday is sleep-in day, and I get to 10am without anyone bothering me.  I spend a lazy morning over crepes (crepes!!  Thank goodness for our organization's French heritage) and a Kindle.  I wonder to myself if it's a first-world problem when one of the many flies buzzing around me lands on my Kindle's touch screen and it turns a page.  A group leaves to the market, to get some fabric made into pants, skirts, dresses, or bags by one of the local tailors.  I wander in to the office to see what I actually left at the end of the day yesterday, and to head to the hospital to change the blood.  The car washers come in, because they didn't finish on Saturday, apparently.  I get their machine out of the mechanic's office.  The med ref catches me and talks to be about a cold chain concern with one of the fridges, which is showing a bit of a high temperature.  The project coordinator and I confirm a meeting for the afternoon for the second interview of a candidate for the recruitment.  It's hot and lazy, and it's ok because it's Sunday.  6pm is volleyball, and everything between now and then is slow.

Life goes on in Aweil, and work goes on in MSF.  Just another weekend in a six-month-long mission.

Water Leveling

On my previous mission, I had an official company blog.  On this mission, I do not.  I am finding myself doing similar technical surveying techniques, so if you missed my post last year about slope surveying, here's a rehashing.

We're doing a large drainage project for the inner courtyard of the Aweil State Civil Hospital.  There are some horror stories of intense flooding in the middle of the hospital, as well as mosquito-producing lakes.  That doesn't sound like it's up to MSF's hygiene standards, so we have a large-scale intervention planned, with gutters, drains, soak-away pits, and water holding tanks.  The first step in all of this is a depth survey of the courtyard.  We're installing a 2% grade on the earth of the courtyard, through landscaping, and a 2% slope on the gutters that will line the walkways.  The 'surveying' boils down to a lot of measurement with simple math.

The infamous courtyard, pretty dry now.

The measurement happens with the construction log and I taking a clear tube about 30m long and wandering into the courtyard.  The contractor and his assistant happen to be walking through (they're on their way to the new showers they are just finalizing), so they stop and help after the first few measurements.

We fill the tube with water, then we attach one end to a stake hammered into the ground at Reference Point 1 (which happens to be a random corner we picked because it was here).  We pound a stake in the ground 30m away, and the comparing of levels is underway.  We compare many points to R1, measuring from the water level to the ground in each place, then move on to R2 for the middle of the courtyard, and finally R3.  We get a jumble of numbers that hopefully makes sense in a few hours when I have the time to sit down and type it out.

Tons of notes, a calculator and a word document is almost like having a CAD landscaping program, right?

A very sophisticated depth chart of the whole courtyard, mostly annotated by hand.

The contractor has started working on the sloping of the courtyard, and we'll bust out the water level several more times over the course of construction, to check slope measurement.  We'll also pour water on the ground and see where it runs, which is kind of more useful as a slope measurement, but sometimes it's good to be technical.

Strike One

On Wednesday evening, we received a letter from the staff delegates telling us that the staff was going on strike at 7am the next morning.  Market prices have inflated so high that current wages aren't enough to feed their families, they say.

What followed was a furious round of meetings, phones calls, and escalations, until we had exhausted our options and time had run out.  Our last meeting of the night, around 10pm was a check-in with department heads before a generalized team meeting to keep all the expats up to date on the situation.

"Will they show up tomorrow?"  "Probably, we're hoping.  We think so.  They might not."  "Is it for the office staff too, or is it just the hospital?"  "We think it's a full-staff strike.  We think that means the base too."  "Do we call our staff tomorrow morning when they don't show up and ask them where they are?"  "No, we'll just play it by ear."  "What are the strike rules?  Does South Sudan have much of a labor law?"  "Unclear, but you're supposed to give 2 weeks notice.  We think."

6:30am on Thursday, April 23rd, saw all the expats mobilizing and quietly eating a cold breakfast.  We watched as the night driver took the bucket to get the morning's bread.  That was a good sign.  Maybe all that excitement was for nothing.

7am was the start of the shift, and at 5 minutes past the hour, the dayshift watchmen haven't shown up.  The night watchmen pull me aside and tell me that they're not coming.  I ask the night watchmen to stay 30 more minutes, just in case the day watchmen are running late, then they can leave.  We start to get the feeling that there might actually be a strike.

8am and I've been in the hospital for half an hour.  I've already done the chart for a newly admitted patient, sterilized the delivery room, and I'm hunting for a hose to fill the water points in front of one of the wards.  I'm on the phone with the base log, getting an update on the security of the compound.  He's locked the old compound and hired two daily worker watchmen for the rest of the compounds.  We've got two drivers, and the early referral car taking a patient to Wau has left.  The base supervisor has shown up.  Good.  I hang up and check in with the hospital log.  We've nailed shut half the gates, which is really impeding traffic flow but it's all we can do at the moment, and we're trying to sort out which key goes to which door.  I switch to the radio as I grab the hose and head in to fill buckets.  I'm worried about patient food, since there weren't cooks for breakfast.  We have several diabetic patients.  I go off to find the Medical Referent to let her know about that.  We may have to buy food in the market for the patients.  The hospital log goes off to make sure lunch is taken care of.

Just before 9am, I pass the construction log coming in to lend a hand.  I ask him to fill the last two water points, and he goes to drop his bag.  I start the hose going and grab two clean aprons to give back to maternity.  As I walk into the delivery room, I grab the two nearest gloves and help the midwife cut the cord of a baby that has just been born as I stepped into the room.  The mother and the caretaker don't speak English, and we don't speak Dinka.  I weigh the baby and start wiping her off as the midwife tends to the mother.  I hope the construction log has turned off the water I started.

The next few hours pass in a haze of sterilization room runs, laundry coaching, medical waste management, sterilizing the delivery room a few more times, and constantly checking in with all staff.  Are you ok?  Can I help?  What do you need?

At 10:30am the Project Coordinator finds me to check on logistics.  I'm in the middle of taking vital signs for 23 patients.  We stop to check in about patient food, hygiene, waste management, cars, base security, expat lunch, and how the strike is going.  We commiserate, and remind each other about a couple points.  He's happy with the report, and we part ways.

Sometime after 11am, the Ministry of Health provide us with some staff.  I'm sterilizing the delivery room (again) at the time, so I do a briefing for all the cleaners about where the mops and gloves and buckets are.  They have one midwife who can translate for me.  She leaves after the first ward.  The rest of the wards are just silent pointing.  The cleaners know how to do their job.  We then go to find soap.

At noon, I pass by the sterilization room for some more delivery kits, and see the base log inside the operation theater.  He's scrubbed in and handing the OT nurse instruments as she changes the dressing on a burned patient.  I confirm with the supply log that he's got lunch covered, and he'll bring it to the hospital so we don't have to leave.  I head out front to check on the gathering of over a hundred staff members.  The Project Coordinator is still there, slowly getting more and more sunburned.  I buy some water, soda, and juice at the shop next door, and slip him a bottle.  How's it going?  Bad.  Ok, bye.  I leave the soda in the milk room for the head nurse, which we've agreed upon as a good centralized location to pass things back and forth.

Construction is still going on for the latrines up in the new ward area, but I pass the construction log who is down taking vitals for the general ward.  He's training a MoH nurse aid who isn't familiar with our form.  I wave to our Outreach nurse, who canceled his movement to Aweil West today, over in the Severe Acute Malnutrition ward.  He's taken charge over there.  Are you ok?  Can I help?  What do you need?

At 1pm, we congregate at the logistics workshop for food.  We gulp water and share stories.  Any gaps in planning?  Any holes?  The MoH staff have really helped us.  Ok to continue?  We eat in shifts.

Patient food has been delayed, since they started cooking late.  I pass the word around to the medics and try to help or investigate in the kitchen.  The three women who have volunteered themselves to be cook all yell at me in Arabic.  I ask them when the sorghum will be ready.  They yell at me in Arabic.  Apparently they need one more salt.  I go get it for them.

The afternoon passes in a similar routine, of vital signs, dumping medical waste buckets, filling water, and slowly daily workers get identified to fill the gaps.  MoH has sent its cleaners, and we get a steady line of workers in front of the workshop who have heard that there's work available.  I keep making rounds, and hand out a bunch of soap.  I refill the water chlorination system, and try to be useful.  The department is starting to roll forward again, and the gaps are closed with these workers.  I see a wheelbarrow of dead branches going past.  Wow, these daily worker outside cleaners are serious about their jobs.

The latrine construction is going well, and the third general ward is a bit hot.  I make some minor adjustments of fans, and go find water.  Are you ok?  Can I help?  What do you need?

At around 6pm I go back to the base to do the security briefing for a new expat who arrived today.  I tell her, if you can get through this next 24 hours, you can get through your mission, no worries.

At 7pm I head back to the hospital for the evening shift change, to see if perhaps the night staff showed up.  A day of negotiations and rhetoric seems to have swayed some people's minds.  We tried to tell them that minimal care needs to be assured.  Health care professionals can't just walk away from their patients.  The PC and I sit outside the hospital, watching the ebb and flow of staff.  There are some threats as some staff try to come to work and are repelled by others.  The police get involved.  There are some arrests.  By 7:30, no one else is coming in to work.  I go check on the cleaners.

After a few more passes through the wards, which are as supported as they can be from a non-medical standpoint (we found daily worker watchmen, and the MoH cleaning staff is on point).  I head back outside, and catch up with the PC.  The news isn't good about getting the hospital functioning for the night.  The Medical Referent will be our midwife all night.  She's been working since 6am.  We meet up with the head nurse just as one of the few national staff supervisors excuses himself.  He said he's been threatened and can't stay to work tonight.  He's very sorry, but he has to leave.  After he steps out, we stand around brainstorming, commiserating, and planning.

A half-naked pregnant woman stumbles out of an ambulance that has pulled up.  Wait, she's not pregnant.  That's a newborn in that blanket in the caretakers' arms.  We point her to maternity.  The shell-shocked group doesn't move.  I turn around and start leading them.  As we're walking the 100 feet to maternity, the woman's placenta falls to the ground.  She's now leaving bloody footprints on the concrete.  I walk the group to the delivery room and hand her off to the midwife students who are on duty.  I look around for the cleaner, but don't find her.  The car radios to ask if I'm coming back to the base.  I grab a mop and say no, come back for me in 15 minutes, around 9:30pm.

I sigh and start to sterilize the delivery room one last time, thinking about the bloody trail all the way back to the entrance to the hospital.

Duck, Duck, Goose

The woman won't move.  She won't acknowledge anyone or turn her head or blink.  She just stays there, nose pressed to the screen door, just outside the maternity ward.

It's 9:30am and the movement of twenty-some-odd patients was supposed to start at 9am.  The corridor is being cleaned, after getting its yearly insecticide spraying last night.  We'll put 6 beds in there for patient overflow.  The rest go up the hill to the new tents.  But no patients have been moved yet, and the day's only getting hotter and later.

A police officer arrives to remove the woman.  A crowd gathers to see what the disturbance is.  I send people around to another entry point.  "Please use the IPD gate.  IPD gate.  IPD gate."  No one wants to leave the spectacle unfolding in front of them.

We've got a packed day in front of us.  We're finally taking all pediatric general ward patients out of the tents huddled in the center of the hospital's courtyard.  This move has been years in the making, after multiple reports of flooding, less-than-ideal placement, and deteriorating tent condition.  But we will take advantage of these infamous tents' last week by moving the maternity ward into the tents and applying their yearly insecticide.  That's a lot to do in one day.

The policeman taps the woman on the shoulder.  She doesn't acknowledge him.  He taps harder until he is hitting her.  He tugs on her arm, but she shrugs him off.  He grabs her clothes and pulls her away, but she struggles free and resumes her vigil.

I was walking in to the hospital when the logistics supervisor intercepted me and explained why he asked a policeman to come.  I hadn't noticed a policeman, but was very happy that I had ended up at the hospital at that exact moment.  The country electrician had peeled off a moment ago, to go check the loads on the generators, and the construction log ditched me with a sympathetic look.  I was on my own to tackle this disturbance.

The policeman wrestles and hits the woman, with everyone looking on.  I finally intervene and ask the policeman to leave her alone.  My white skin gives me unprecedented authority, and he acquiesces.  It's not my hospital, but all of a sudden, I'm making the decisions.  He shrugs and retreats, probably happy that he didn't have to see that argument through.  The woman had returned to pressing her nose against the gate.

I'm preoccupied thinking about the packed day, which might stretch until 8pm or later, and I've got a lot on my mind.  A few minutes before, the co-referent for logistics for the country called to tell me his plane ticket was mixed up, and he's postponed his visit to my project for another few days.  Thoughts of the plans in limbo, the projects blocked for technical questions, and the HR support desperately needed all dissolve as he updates me on his schedule.  He asked, "anything urgent we need to take care of?"  My answer?  Well, it's been urgent for the last month, so it can certainly wait two more days.  I try not to rock the boat.

I make my way around through another gate to get to the other side of the door that the woman is staring through.  I talk to the watchman as the carpenter suddenly appears, to nail the door shut.  We call the floating watchman to stand at this door, then go try to track down the supervisor to open the alternate gate that normally leads straight to the Operating Theater.  We get the alternate gate open and start directing people through.  I catch the eye of the medical referent as the gate swings shut, but we're both on to other things.

Today marks the third week that I've been in this project, but it certainly feels longer.  I vaguely remember some experiences from a few weeks ago, but they feel ages ago.  We had a water and sanitation specialist come to visit for technical support, and she was here for weeks, but that was years ago.  Actually, she came a few days after me, and stayed for a week.  How am I going to last six months?

All watchmen are in place, traffic has been directed, and somehow during the disturbance, some patients started moving wards.  When I make it into the tent, half the ward is empty already.  Excellent.  The woman is still standing with her nose pressed to the door.  The staff tell me this isn't the first time she's been there, and she's not entirely right in the head.

I catch up with the medical referent, and we game-plan the bed count of the hospital, patient distribution, impact on medical HR, and tent cooling measures we can take.  As we wander into the tent to check ambient temperature, the OBGYN comes in to consult on a couple cases.  I excuse myself to go find water.

For the rest of the morning, we bustle around moving patients, and by the time we are ready to move maternity, which goes through this woman's door, she's nowhere in sight.

The rest of the day goes smoothly in a whirlwind of moving, dust, sweat, musical beds, and good humor.  I get out of my last meeting at 6pm to realize that the spraying has already been done.

Success.  The day is done with all objectives met.

Now to do it again tomorrow, with all the surprises and twists that a new day will bring.

Birthday

Sometimes you have a really rough day.  Sometimes you don't realize you've had a really rough day until you're sitting down at night and all you can do is stare at the wall.

But sometimes you see something really cool, and you realize you're having a great day when you catch yourself humming, with a skip in your step.

The hospital here delivers 45% of all babies of all 5 MSF sections in the entire country of South Sudan.  That's not 45% of all babies in South Sudan, but still translates to a few births every single day.  I got to see my first birth today.

I was doing rounds in the hospital, and had just finished wandering through the General Pediatric Ward, which is deserted as it's being painted (we moved all the patients into the hallway... Life goes on).  I decided to pass through Maternity, which is a very smooth-running ward.  There aren't too many sick people there, so things have the appearance of being low maintenance and easy.  As I make my way back to the delivery room, I hear loud chanting/singing/yelling.  I poke my head through the saloon-style swinging doors and say hi to the delivery room staff.  The yelling continues from beyond the partition.  I ease my way around to the delivery area to find two women up in stirrups.  The OBGYN is intently working on the business end of the near woman, and the two expat midwives are chatting with national staff near the yelling woman.  They don't seem too concerned.

The OBGYN starts explaining to me the abscess on the near woman's vulva, and the catheter he's inserting to keep it drained.  I'm all for privacy, so I immediately feel pretty out of place.  I'm rescued by the far woman starting up again with a sing-song chant/yell.  I guess it's another contraction.  The midwife team jumps into action, and it looks like the baby is crowning.  The action dies down, and the OBGYN puts in a few more sutures.

I pretend to be completely at ease, and make myself useful by surveying the biomedical equipment in the room.  I can always blend into the background while I check me some serial numbers.  A big yell/song draws my attention, and the baby's head is out.  All of a sudden, one midwife is climbing on top of the woman, pulling her knees back to her ears with a vengeance.  The other midwife is bearing down on her stomach, and the OBGYN drops his suture work and rips off his gloves to push.  Apparently something important just happened.

Out pops a vaguely purple little boy, who gets toweled off and put on mom's stomach.  A few beats later, his yells replace his mother's.

The OBGYN explains that it was a very big baby, and that's dangerous to let the baby stay inside after the head has come out.  Best to get them out quick.

The cord is cut, the placenta is quietly delivered, and the OBGYN fixes his final sutures.  I sneak out as they're measuring and prodding the baby.  As I leave, I discover a smile sneaking across my face.

Happy Birthday, buddy.

Six Months in South Sudan

Two years ago, I was typing into my phone on my first MSF mission, ruminating on my motivations for going on mission.  A memorable lead-up to my application to MSF was a book by a doctor working for MSF called Six Months in Sudan, which was a string of blog posts, lacking any capital letters, recounting his six-month mission somewhere in Sudan.  Years after reading that book, I was on my first MSF mission, for Six Months in Malawi.  A couple years after that, I'm in the Sudan.  Now there's a South Sudan, the world's newest country, so I'll have to look up where his mission took him.  I could be following in his footsteps, with my Six Months in South Sudan.

For the next six months, I'll be the Logistics Referent for our project at a regional referral hospital in a large town in North Bahr el Ghazal, in the northwest of the country.  We're pretty near the 14-mile zone, which is a controversial buffer between Sudan and its civil-war-torn spin-off to the south, but the area is relatively calm.  That can change in an instant though, so we diligently go through our security routines, following movement guidelines, radio checks, and curfews.

It's the dry season, meaning it's logistics season.  There's some construction to do, and a lot of supplies to lay up for the rainy season.  As with all MSF projects, things are in a bit of a disarray when I arrive.  They're usually unusual, in the sense that nothing is every smooth, calm, stable, or easy.  We say to each other that if it's easy, it's not MSF.  Gaps in filling positions makes even the best-run project devolve into a mired mess of miscommunication.  When anyone from coordination or international headquarters visits, everything of course breaks, reverses, intensifies, or somehow dissolves into chaos, just to prove that even the best-run projects are tenuously close to derailing.  We always know the 'usual,' the 'normal, base operating level,' which never seems to get around to being experienced.  We're always in high season, rainy season, measles season, construction season, visiting season, planning season, or changeover season.  Sometimes a few at once.

But if it were easy, I wouldn't be here.  None of us would.

Solar Dehydrator

This is less of an adventure, and more of a construction report, but it aids my adventuring, so I decided it was blog-worthy.  A friend and I built a solar dehydrator out of beer cans.  I was toying with the idea of building a dehydrator, maybe with a lamp, maybe with a desiccated toaster, maybe with solar heat.  A few google searches later determined that solar heat was very do-able, and in fact very cheap.

We picked up a shelf structure, curbside, and commenced planning how to turn it into a solar dehydrator.  A few google searches, videos, and picture mash-ups later, we hatched a plan to connect several beer cans into metal tubes to heat up air and channel it into a drying chamber.  Scrap-gathering turned up almost all the materials we needed, then a quick trip to a building materials recycling center completed the set.

The first batch was tomatoes and carrots, then we threw in some apples.  Next up will be onions and garlic.  Bring on the sunshine!